Ys Book 1 & 2

Another game I got my hand on was Ys book 1 & 2 for the TurboGrafx-16, an action RPG were the basic form of attack is... running into enemies. An odd form of attack I believe was used in earlier games since there wasn't enough graphic power to show the sword attack or so. With a bit of imagination your character, Adol, either fences around the enemy to deliver the deadly strike with his blade or he rams the enemy head on caring nothing for his well-being to save... whoever needs saving. The story is fairly simple, you arrive at this new continent were there once stood a powerful civilization named Ys (pronounced ease or something like that) were dark forces gathers so you must stop this darkness and find the clues for what happened. Fairly standard atlantian story-telling, sadly the game suffers a bit for being two games in one. This separates places and characters making it feel very restricted in terms of exploring as well as having problem creating characters that are memorable past their special scene. It still worked as a story, just feeling disjointed after clearing the first half.

Graphically and musically the game have very nice anime cut-scenes and sprites as well as a decent orchestrated score as well as voice acting. Sad part is that in some places the voices hard to hear and there is no text so you must listen really hard to know who spoke and whatever happened to the plot. All in all a decent game that has an interesting mythos, sadly the other parts wasn't released on the Virtual Console so hopefully they get released this time around, although with the different releases and such I have a hard time seeing it. The fun thing is that with this game and Castlevania: Rondo of Blood I really start to see the TG-16 in a very good light, although that could just be I'm only touching the best of the consoles library.